Copyright 2009 by the National Art Education Association
Studies in Art Education: A Journal of Issues and Research
2009, 51(1), 78-91
“As an
unintentional
construction
formed from
repressions of the
symbolic order,
Lacan considers
the unconscious
to be a more
credible source of
subjectivity than
the consciously
manipulated ego.”
Artmaking, Subjectivity, and
Signification
S y d n e y W a lk e r
The Ohio State University
Drawing upon Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, neuroscience brain
research, and the practices of contemporary artists Ann Hamilton,
Jasper Johns, Elizabeth Murray, and Oliver Herring, this article
argues for the relevance of conscious and unconscious knowledge in
artistic practice. Parallels drawn between Lacanian psychoanalytic
clinical practice and artistic practice demonstrate a meaningful
interdisciplinary alliance forged through a shared interest in
conferring agency on the unconscious. The description of a recent
graduate art education course, designed around artistic practices
with conscious and unconscious knowledge, strongly exemplifies
the pedagogical implications of the foregoing investigation.
Correspondence regarding this article may be sent to the author at the
Department of Art Education, 152 Hopkins Hall, 128 N. Oval Mall, The Ohio
State University, Columbus, OH 43210. E-mail: [email protected]
Studies in Art Education / Volume 51, No. 1
77
A
s art education professors, art
teachers, and students, we do not
know enough about how meaning
is produced through artmaking. Often,
artists themselves cannot give articulated or
nuanced accounts of their signifying practices.
Drawing upon Lacanian psychoanalytic theory,
the present article wrestles with this issue in an
investigation of artmaking as a consequence of
both conscious and unconscious thought
processes. Scholar Shoshana Felman (1993) similarly theorizes literary practices of writing and
reading as a deadly struggle between conscious
and unconscious knowledge, and the following
discussion focuses on this struggle. The discussion
also incorporates related findings from neuroscience brain research into insight and problem
solving to amplify and support this position. While
the two theoretical discourses—psychoanalytic
theory and cognitive neuroscience—derive from
very dissimilar perspectives and aims, they share a
common regard for thought processes other than
deliberate mind­fulness.
The article begins with an account of installation artist Ann Hamilton’s artistic practice as
a demonstration of how artmaking operates at
both conscious and unconscious levels. Following
this presentation, the article examines Lacan’s
conception of unconscious knowledge followed
by scholars Dany Nobus and Malcolm Quinn’s
(2005) theorizing of Lacanian psychoanalytic
practice as a failure of conscious knowledge. The
implications of Lacanian clinical practice, as Nobus
and Quinn explicate, purposively invoke unconscious subjective truth, a clinical strategy that
has implications for artistic practice as a similarly
contested site characterized by tensions between
conscious and unconscious knowledge. A brief
account of current brain research and insight
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follows with findings that offer interesting neuroscientific parallels to psychoanalytic concepts of
conscious and unconscious thought processes.
Subsequently, the article looks at painters Jasper
Johns and Elizabeth Murray and sculptor, video,
and performance artist Oliver Herring to further
exemplify the relevance of these different modes
of thinking for artistic practice. In the latter section
of the article, a description of a recent graduate
art education course, “Image Makers or Meaning
Makers,” addresses the pedagogical implications
of the previous investigation of psychoanalytic
theory, neuroscience brain research, and contemporary artistic practice.1
Installation Artist Ann Hamilton
Although discursive and symbolic knowledge
figure prominently in Ann Hamilton’s practice, she
consistently undercuts language to evacuate a
space for non-discursive ways of knowing. Critic
Joan Simon (2002) recounts that in Hamilton’s
MFA installation, the space between memory (1985),
“language became a palpable material” (p.44). For
this work, Hamilton instructed a fellow graduate
student to enunciate a Swedish text. It was not,
however, the content of the text that mattered—
most viewers would have found it incomprehensible—but rather, the rhythm of the reader’s
enunciations that became of consequence.
Frequently, Hamilton’s installations include
language transformed in ways that frustrate
comprehension such as barely audible whispering, garbled speech or, as in mantle (1998),
radio receivers picking up overlapping voices,
static, and Morse code. Such actions emphasize
the materiality of language as do the attendants
in Hamilton’s installations systematically, line-byline, erasing, cutting, or burning printed text. In
conversation with museum studies professor Mary
Ann Hamilton, tropos, Installation, October 7 - June 19, 1993,
Dia Center, New York, New York.
Studies in Art Education / Volume 51, No. 1
79
Coffey (2001), Hamilton articulates the function of
language in her practice. She remarks,
A lot of people have asked me if I am trying
to make a prelinguistic sort of work by
erasing text. I don’t think I’m doing that at
all. I’m very interested in the hierarchies
of our habits of perception, and how, if
something can be contained within the
discursive structure of words, that we trust
it will have more legitimacy than other
kinds of information or ways of knowing. I
think that I’m just trying to take this access
and tilt it, so that the felt-quality of the
words is equal to, but not dominant over,
other kinds of sensory perceptions. (p.15)
In critic Lynne Cooke’s (1999) critique of tropos,
Hamilton further explains her regard for sensate
experience. She remarks, “you have to trust the
things you can’t name … You feel through your
body, you take in the world through your skin”
(p. 1).
For Hamilton, conceiving ways to transform the
discursive represents a conscious intellectual act;
however, the artist’s comments from an interview
with critic Lynne Cooke (1999) suggest other
options at work as well. In this interview Hamilton
observes,
On one level you do this intellectualized
research and you think you’re really onto
something—but it’s almost as if you’re
keeping yourself busy because you’re
blind to deeper issues. It’s like you set up
a process that allows these issues to rise
to the surface. And as my research takes
its own path it almost forms an organism
within which each project occurs. (p. 25)
Hamilton’s comments strongly remind one
of psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan’s privileging of
subjective truth and Nobus and Quinn’s (2005)
descriptions of Lacanian psychoanalytic practice
as “a ‘game beneath the game,’ in which the mind
is wagered against the goal of subjective truth …
The darkness or ‘death’ of the mind becomes the
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light for the subject …” (p.148). This is not thinking
outside of the box but remaining attentive to
issues turning up from more subjective sources.
The ensuing discussions further explicate these
and other related concepts from Lacanian theory
and clinical practice as a ground for comprehending conceptualization and subjectivity in
artistic practice.
Lacan and the Unconscious
Early 20th-century Surrealist and Dadaist
artists and literary figures, influenced by the
emergence of Freudian psychology, considered
the unconscious to be a liberating force, freeing
society from the repressions of society and social
conventions.2 Surrealist recognition of the unconscious steered artistic practice away from cerebral
rationality toward the irrational, emotive, and
intuitive aspects of human experience. Lacan’s
personal interest in Surrealism, association with
literary and artistic Surrealist figures such as
André Breton, Salvador Dali, and George Bataille,
along with publishing several early articles in the
Surrealist journal Minotaure, has been well documented. Drawn to Surrealism, Lacan enthusiastically sympathized with the Surrealists’ rejection
of socially enforced rationality and logic to rather
embrace the more subjective irrational aspects of
human experience.
With its emphasis on discourse and the textually
constructed self, contemporary poststructualist
theory has minimized psychological persuasions
regarding subjectivity. Lacanian scholar Marshall
Alcorn (1994) considers that Lacan, however, has
uniquely synthesized these two very different
conceptions of the subject, the psychoanalytic and
the poststructualist. Alcorn observes, “for Lacan,
relations between discourse and the subject are
two sided. The subject operates upon discourse,
and discourse operates upon the subject” (p. 27).
Importantly, for the present purposes, this theoretical duality permits theorizing meaning making
in artistic practice as highly engaged with the
social order, but concomitantly, in a decidedly
subjective manner.
Lacan adopts Freud’s tripartite structural model
of the psyche, the id, ego, and superego, but, as
Eugene Goodread (1991) observes, “transfers the
site of psychoanalysis from the ego to the id”
(p.145). Lacan finds the ego to be deceptive and
false, deliberately fashioned with signifiers taken
from the symbolic order to represent an idealized
version of the self. Hence, authentic subjectivity
resides, for Lacan (2006a), only in the involuntary
constructions of the unconscious. As an unintentional construction formed from repressions of the
symbolic order, Lacan considers the unconscious
to be a more credible source of subjectivity than
the consciously manipulated ego.
In thinking through subjectivity and artistic
practice, I prefer Alcorn’s position expressed in
his contention that discourse operates upon the
subject and the subject upon discourse. It is this
interaction that secures attention in this study. The
artist acts upon discourse consciously intellectualizing their practice, but also, by overtly making
a space for the unconscious, permits discourse to
act upon them. This does not negate the fact that
the unconscious will intrude uninvited into the
artist’s practice, as Freud and Lacan theorized the
disruption of conscious speech with slips of the
tongue, jokes, and so forth; however, the focus of
this study resides with the artist’s knowing efforts to
entreat unconscious knowledge. That is, although
the unconscious is always directly inaccessible
manifesting itself as a disruption to conscious
thought, the artist can create fertile conditions
for allowing and acknowledging these types of
intrusions. In the previous description of Ann
Hamilton’s practice, for example, the artist recognized deeper ideas and concepts that emerged
although she was not consciously pursuing them.
Hamilton’s (qtd in Cooke, 1999) remark, “it’s like
you set up a process that allows these issues to
rise to the surface” (¶25), identifies the focus of
this study in seeking to understand how the artist
can design his or her practice in ways that overtly
permit the functioning of the unconscious. Later
observations from Jasper Johns and Elizabeth
Murray suggest a similar recognition and valuing
of creating this space as their practice.
Lacan followed Freud in linking the unconscious with language but argued against his
biological formation to famously characterize
the unconscious as structured like a language. In
Seminar VII Lacan (1992) asserted,
We only grasp the unconscious finally when
it is explicated, in that part of it which is
articulated into words. It is for this reason
that we have the right … to recognize
that the unconscious itself has in the end
no other structure than the structure of
language. (p. 32)
Both Freud and Lacan theorized partial
knowledge of the unconscious through coded
verbal signs such as omissions, slips of the tongue,
hierarchies, negations, paralipsis, pauses, and
mixed metaphors (Fink, 2007). In a deliberate
effort to suppress conscious discourse and draw
out unconscious expression, Lacanian psychoanalytic practice aims to evoke such speech. Dany
Nobus and Malcolm Quinn (2005) conceptualize
Lacanian psychoanalytic practice in these terms
figuring it as a failure of knowledge. The following,
Nobus and Quinn’s account of clinical strategies
enacted by the Lacanian analyst, offers a useful
perspective for thinking through the artist’s efforts
to invoke unconscious thought in artistic practice.
The Failure of Knowledge
Nobus and Quinn (2005) explain Lacanian
psychoanalytic practice as an active instigation
to occasion the failure of conscious knowledge
whereby the analyst attempts to elicit unconscious speech from the analysand [patient] in the
form of verbal omissions, slips of the tongue, hierarchies, negations, paralipsis, pauses, and mixed
metaphors. Nobus and Quinn conceptualize these
signs of unconscious speech as the fulfillment of a
Lacanian analytic goal in which “the analysand is
guided not towards a moment of (self ) recognition,
Studies in Art Education / Volume 51, No. 1
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as the culmination of a Socratic ‘know thyself,’ but
towards a practice of non-recognition in which
knowledge appears as a foreign substance” (p.111);
hence, the failure of knowledge.
Nobus and Quinn (2005) assert that the aims of
Lacanian psychoanalytic practice are not achieved
by thinking outside the box nor the result of
conscious will. They explain,
The whole notion of activity is shifted from
the inner workings of a mind towards an
action that is taken against its integrity …
success is not achieved by following a set of
codes and rules, substituting one discourse
or discipline for another, or by ‘thinking
outside the box.’ Success is instead insured
by a ‘game beneath the game,’ in which
the mind is wagered against the goal of
subjective truth … The darkness or ‘death’ of
the mind becomes the light for the subject.
(p.148)
Almost a cliché for creative and innovative
behavior, the notion of ‘thinking outside the box’
involves conscious knowledge and intellectualization. It is not an instance of unconscious
thought. This becomes an important point in
thinking about artistic practice whereby unconscious thought might be confused with novelty
or cleverness. Attempting to shut down conscious
thought, avoiding conscious contemplation, is
quite different from skillfully pondering canny
possibilities.
In Lacanian psychoanalytic practice, the analyst
withdraws normative intersubjective relationships with the analysand, playing dumb, feigning
blindness, deliberately mishearing and other
such deliberate tactics designed to undermine
conscious knowledge. Further, Lacan (2006b)
emphatically declares that the analyst directs the
treatment but not the patient (p. 492). He compares
the clinical experience to a bridge game in which
the analyst enlists the aid of the dummy [le mort],
suggesting that the analyst’s feelings “have only
one possible place in the game, that of the dummy”
(p. 493). Nobus and Quinn (2005) interpret Lacan’s
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directives as requiring the analyst “to absent and
negate his own agency, not performing as a
demanding, suggestible, or competitive subject,
but conducting the treatment in a manner that
does not lead or seduce the analysand” (p. 169).
Nobus and Quinn’s (2005) description of
Lacanian psychoanalytic clinical practices, asserting
agency over conscious knowledge, intimates
possible considerations for artistic practice. That is,
might the artist also operate similarly, absenting
and negating agency over the work; directing
the treatment, but not the work; and suspending
their usual rules for practice, purposively playing
dumb, feigning blindness, and mishearing? Such
actions could figuratively describe artistic practice
when the artist voluntarily surrenders intellectual
control. The following discussion of neuroscience
brain research, advocating the necessity for similar
inattentive behavior in achieving insights with
problem solving, offers additional support for such
strategies.
Cognitive Neuroscience and Insight
Widely acclaimed author Jonah Lehrer (2008)
recounts cognitive neuroscientist Mark JungBeeman’s investigation of brain activity and insight.
In this accounting, Lehrer presents Jung-Beeman’s
observation that insight requires both the left and
right brain hemispheres. Charged with different
functions, the left hemisphere excels at denotation
while the right hemisphere deals with “everything
that gets left out of a dictionary definition, such as
the emotional charge in a sentence or metaphor”
(p. 41). Lehrer enlists Jung-Beeman’s explanation
that “language is so complex that the brain has to
process it in two different ways at the same time
… it needs to see the forest and [emphasis in the
original] the trees. The right hemisphere is what
helps you see the forest” (p. 41).
Through their research into the insight process,
Jung-Beeman and his colleague John Kounios
discovered that the brain first intently focuses
all its attention on the problem at hand. Lehrer
(2008) notes Jung-Beeman’s and Kounios’ expla-
nation that “once the brain is sufficiently focused,
the cortex needs to relax to seek out the more
remote association in the right hemisphere, which
will provide the insight” (p. 43). Lehrer additionally
reports that Jung-Beeman and Kounios surprisingly found “trying to force an insight can actually
prevent the insight” (p. 43). According to Lehrer,
Jung-Beeman and Kounios conclude, “while it’s
commonly assumed that the best way to solve a
difficult problem is to focus, minimize distractions,
and pay attention only to the relevant details, this
clenched state of mind may inhibit the sort of
creative connections that lead to sudden breakthroughs” (p. 43).
Jung-Beeman and Kounois’ recognition of two
types of brain activity, one characterized by intentional focus and the other distinguished by a more
relaxed, distracted state of mind, suggest psychoanalytic practice that acknowledges the presence
of both conscious and unconscious thought in the
clinical setting.3 The ensuing discussion examines
this dichotomy further as it is also manifested in
the artistic practices of painters Jasper Johns and
Elizabeth Murray, installation artist Ann Hamilton,
and sculptor and video and performance artist
Oliver Herring.
Painters Jasper Johns and
Elizabeth Murray
Although recognized as a highly intellectual
painter, Jasper Johns speaks of the benefits of
focusing on the making of a work rather than its
meaning. In David Sylvester (1997) Johns explains,
“it may be that focusing on the making diminishes thinking about what one intends the work
to mean, leaves the unconscious with room in
which to operate, allows meaning to accrue
without interference” (p. 10). Sylvester notes
that to this end, Johns frequently fills his sketchbooks with drawing commands to be carried
out in his painting practice. These commands
take the form of nonsense such as “Take a skull.
Cover it with paint. Rub it against canvas. Skull
against canvas” (p. 10). Johns’ drawing commands
particularly impress because the artist is known
to exercise considerable intellectual command
over his practice. Johns’ abdication of such control
evinces a belief in the merit of alternative modes
of conceptualization. The following remarks by
painter Elizabeth Murray (2001-2007) are similarly
suggestive of deliberate intentions to forego intellectual control. Murray observes,
For a couple of years I’ve been working with
cutting out shapes and kind of glomming
them together and letting it go where it may
[emphasis added]. Like basically making
a zigzag shape and making a rectangular
shape and a circular bloopy fat cloudy
shape and just putting them all together
and sort of letting the cards fall where they
may [emphasis added]. And I don’t know
why I am doing it this way.… The thing
that has been hard about these paintings
is that I don’t know how I am going to get
them resolved. It’s like the resolution has to
happen without anybody seeing it, not even
me [emphasis added]. (p. 2)
Murray’s admission to an invisibility inhabiting her practice reflects psychoanalytic claims
for the surreptitious arrival of the unconscious as
well as Jung-Beeman and Kounois’ finding that
insights occur when one is not looking or trying so
hard. Later, it will be found that this same notion
emerged from a graduate student participating in
an art education artmaking course.
Oliver Herring: Chance Encounters
In his internationally renowned public project,
TASK—performed at the Hirshhorn Museum
and Sculpture Garden (2006), the University of
Maryland, and performances at the Seattle Public
library in Seattle (2008), as well as in Philadelphia,
Toronto, and San Francisco)—Oliver Herring turns
over intellectual control to strangers. For the performance, Herring provides an array of props, writes a
number of simple tasks, places the written tasks in
separate envelopes, and sets up basic rules. Prior
to the performance, Herring instructs the selected
Studies in Art Education / Volume 51, No. 1
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performers to bring three sets of clothes to personalize the experience and communicate how they
want to present themselves to the audience.
Additionally, Herring enjoins the performers to
bring printed reference material as a possible
resource during the performance. The performers
receive no other information other than the time,
location, and date of the performance.
To begin the performance, participants take an
envelope, apply themselves to fulfilling the task,
write a new task, put it in the task pool, and then
select a new task. Herring produces the entire
performance, 5 to 8 hours, in three acts with two
intermissions. Herring notes that after about 5 or
10 minutes the performance is self-generating
and one doesn’t know what is going to happen
(Herring, 2001-2007).
For the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture
Garden TASK performance, Herring chose a diverse
group of 60 persons from a pool of 700 volunteers. Assistant Curator Kristen Hileman (2006)
describes the heterogeneous group of volunteers
as “members of the military, community activists,
teachers, restaurant workers, doctors, ministers,
scientists, lawyers, high school and college
students, hairstylists, retirees, IT workers, and selfdescribed ‘bureaucrats’ and ‘vagabonds’” (p. 1).
Individually and collaboratively, the volunteers
performed tasks such as build a small monument
to the people of DC; declare war; build an army;
stop, drop and roll; stand on one of the tables
that are used for writing tasks and move your
legs for as long as you deem necessary; and find
two participants who speak languages you don’t
understand and have them talk to each other in
those languages for a minute.
Herring’s attitude toward artistic control is
of particular interest. In an interview with writer
Lindsay Warner (2007), the artist remarks, “I never
go into a project with any preconceived ideas or
plans … I trust the moment to generate something with the people involved” (p. 3). He further
admits to writer Susan Sollins (2007), “once I
gained the confidence to just play with the unex-
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pected and the more chance I could incorporate
into the work, the more my work grew because
I couldn’t predict what would happen” (p. 150).
Parallels between Herring’s construction of TASK
and Jasper Johns’ drawing commands could be
drawn as both artists construct specific conditions that discharge artmaking beyond the artist’s
control. One difference rests with how Johns and
Herring produce meaning from the intentional
letting go. For Johns, significance derives from
working through the results of the command in his
painting. For Herring, the process is not as direct.
Although the TASK website indicates that the
performers generate meaning in personal reflections of themselves and others, endowing the
often pointless and foolish tasks with significance,
Herring elects not to participate in performing
the tasks but documents the event with a video
recorder.4 Meaning for Herring derives from a
larger perspective of the totality of the event. In
a letter composed to the 60 participants from the
Hirshhorn performance, Herring suggests a future
collective effort to structure the video footage,
still photographs, and written recollections into a
more meaningful document. Herring (n.d.) states,
“I am curious to see what happens if we collectively shape the material into something unexpected, like the actual performance itself” (p. 5).
Herring’s desire to structure the documentation of
the TASK performance could appear as an effort to
further grasp the meaning of the event. Shaping
the documentation suggests the struggle Felman
(1993) theorizes between conscious and unconscious knowledge. Thus, renouncing conscious
control is not sufficient in itself; the artist must
imbue the surrender with significance.
The brief look at the practices of four contemporary artists foregrounds the concerted effort
artists undertake to create distinct conditions for
engaging conscious and unconscious thought.
The following relates the pedagogical implications of this conception of artistic practice with
a description of a recent graduate art education
course, “Image Makers or Meaning Makers.”
Image Makers or Meaning Makers
Throughout the graduate course,“Image Makers
or Meaning Makers,” reflection played a major
role in class discussions and student journaling.
Given that meaning and purpose intertwine, the
students’ first reflective task was contemplating
the questions: (a) Why make art? and (b) Why do
I make art? Establishing this essential foundation
was requisite for pursuing the course purpose
to investigate meaning making as it transpires
in artistic practice. The course took the form of a
sequence of artmaking experiences, alternately
designed around conscious and unconscious
knowledge, and interspersed with the study of
contemporary artists’ practices, reflective writing,
and group discussions. The goal was not to
produce a final body of work but to set a reflective
process in motion, one that would strengthen
and intensify understandings of meaning making
and artistic practice. The instructions for the final
presentations directed the students to primarily
focus on the evolution of their artmaking process
during the course, rather than the final works.
The expectation was that such a process would
continue after the conclusion of the course.
To commence the artmaking process, each
student selected a big idea, defined as broad,
comprehensive, representations of significant
human experience and also selected related
topics. The chosen big ideas that directed the
students’ artmaking throughout the course
included place, memory, social illnesses, power,
and identity. The students’ selection of related
topics supplied the big ideas with obligatory
focus and specificity as, for example, the big idea
of memory inspired topics such as family history,
social history, personal experience, storytelling,
time, forgetting, mapping, and identity. Armed
with big ideas, the students produced a visual grid
of objects that could be possibly associated with
their big idea and topic. Additionally, the graduate
students unpacked their big ideas and topics
linguistically with lists of key terms and concepts.
Next, through larger drawings, the students
created additional meaning for their big idea and
topic by positioning and repositioning selected
objects from the visual grid into diverse contexts.
These beginning exercises stressed conscious
knowledge and intellectual activity as students
purposively constructed meaning through
generated associations and relationships.
Students subsequently switched to a more
intuitive thinking mode taking up Jasper Johns’
drawing commands strategy. One successful technique for working with the drawing commands
involved utilizing sculptor Richard Serra’s (2002)
well-known “Verb List.” Produced during the era
of Process Art, Serra accumulated more than 100
verbs for processes that could be done to or with
a given material including such terms as “to roll,”
“to crease,” “to bend,” “to disarrange,” “to rotate,” and
“to gather.” Selecting terms from Serra’s list, the
students wrote drawing commands for themselves
and other students, placed them in a common
pool, and randomly selected a drawing command
for their own artmaking. Engaging the commands
as an impetus for investigating their big idea, the
students proceeded without pre-thinking the
end results. Meaning was derived as the students
subsequently reflected on the resultant artworks.
Often the drawing commands posed new directions for students’ understandings of their big idea,
ones they continued in other works.
To contrast the impromptu approach fostered
by the drawing commands, the students were
then occupied in studying the oppositional strategies that construct photographer Shirin Neshat’s
black-and-white photographic series, The Women
of Allah (1993-1997), and in reading an excerpt
from author Peter Elbow’s (1993) essay, “The Uses
of Binary Thinking.” After these preliminary activities, students created their own series of oppositions for further artmaking with their big ideas.
Succeeding this conscious intellectualizing of
their big idea with oppositions, the students joined
in producing artworks from a random assortment
of items purchased from the local dollar stores.
Commonplace items such as drinking straws,
Studies in Art Education / Volume 51, No. 1
85
Mindi Rhoades, Art Education PhD student,
The Ohio State University. Untitled,
Installation, 2008, mixed media.
Daniel Hoffman, MFA student, The Ohio
State University. Untitled, Installation, 2008,
mixed media.
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Jessica Brandl, MFA student, The Ohio State
University. Untitled, Installation,
2008, graphite.
Edward Ostrander, MFA
student, The Ohio State
University. Untitled, 2008,
mixed media.
Molly Burke, MFA student, The Ohio State University. Untitled,
2008, wax, paper.
Student Artworks
Studies in Art Education / Volume 51, No. 1
87
google eyes, fortune cookies, maps, plastic toys,
envelopes, kitchen utensils, feathers, toothpaste,
reading glasses, toothpicks, balloons, coffee filters,
safety pins, string, rubber bands, stickers, clothes
pins, wrapping paper, and mirrors became the
students’ artistic media.
The students were given permission to play
with the unexceptional materials. They had
witnessed artist Jessica Stockholder’s unorthodox
installations composed of consumer objects
and Ann Hamilton’s installations fabricated with
highly unconventional materials such as 60,000
cut flowers, two tons of horsehair, 200 hundred
canaries, five male peacocks, 40,000 pounds of flour,
4,000 used blue work uniforms, 14,000 human and
animal teeth, and 750,000 copper pennies. The play
was semi-structured imposing rules requiring the
students to focus on their big idea, utilize the dollar
store items, and work from a specific play strategy
such as revealing and concealing, staging fictions,
or creating reversals. The sizeable accumulation
of dollar store items along with the injunction to
play seemed to electrify the students. The enthusiasm for making became palpable. The students’
written comments indicated that, surprisingly, they
discovered play to be a highly responsive strategy
for conceptualizing ideas.
Encountering artmaking as an engagement
with unconscious knowledge was unexpectedly
radical for many of the students. Their final papers
professed being exceptionally challenged to alter
customary ways of artmaking, recognize quintessentially different ways of working, admit to
previous formulaic artmaking, and acknowledge
sometimes strong resistance in forsaking
comfortable patterns of practice. Regardless of
their prior level of artmaking, these experiences
seemed to call prior conceptions of artmaking into
question. However, the students also expressed
a positive enthusiasm and appreciation for what
they gained from the experience. One MFA student
remarked that he had found himself somewhat
lost after his first year of graduate school, but felt
he now understood how sometimes looking too
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hard can blind one and that he had acquired a set
of tools that would allow him to see significant
connections in his work.
Summation
This present article has extended a Lacanian
paradigm to artistic practice as an opening effort.
Art educator jan jagodzinski’s (1997, 2004, 2005)
exceptional research into contemporary youth
culture from a Lacanian paradigm represents
the substantial depth to be attained from the
employment of this vantage point. jagodzinski
skillfully draws upon Lacanian psychoanalytic
concepts of subjectivity, identity, transgression,
desire and alienation, the Law, and an ethics of
the Real to explore the impact of contemporary
media on youth culture. This same psychoanalytic
discourse could comparably deepen our understandings of artistic practice, raising an appreciation for, among others, issues such as voice,
identity and recognition, the power of desire,
resistance and disruption, master signifiers, and
the pursuit of the Real as an expansion of our
conceptualization of artistic practice.
As jagodzinski demonstrates in his work,
a Lacanian perspective positions art learning
within the realm of the socio-cultural as well the
subjective. Lacanian scholar Marshall Alcorn’s
(1994) earlier observation that, “the subject
operates upon discourse, and discourse operates
upon the subject” (p. 27), also evidences the fact
that a Lacanian perspective cannot be conceived
without recognition of a socio-cultural context.
For Lacan, unconscious knowledge, formed from
repressions of the symbolic, does not vacate
the socio-cultural world, but manifests it in a
more authentic manner. Thusly, from a Lacanian
perspective, the social networks, historical connections, cultural institutions, economic constraints,
and artistic and socio-cultural issues that inhabit
artistic practice demand recognition as contributions to the artist’s subjectivity. Given this frame of
reference, Lacanian perspectives of artistic practice
could draw upon the substantial body of work
from art educators who advocate a sociological
approach to artistic practice. Concomitantly,
through recognition of the unconscious, a Lacanian
perspective subverts constraints of conscious
knowledge as a possibility for revealing new ways
of understanding and signifying the world.
Drawing connections among psychoanalytic
theory, neuroscience, and contemporary artistic
practice, the preceding discussion identified the
significance of both conscious and unconscious
thought for artmaking. An important finding that
emerged from this interdisciplinary perspective
was the import of the conditions of thinking
whether in the clinic, studio, scene of everyday
problem solving, or the classroom. Thought
processes responded to particular conditions. The
description of the graduate art education course,
“Image Makers or Meaning Makers,” demonstrated
that structuring the conditions for thinking with
artmaking can be highly influential in guiding
students’ conceptualization of meaning. Hence,
although the invisibility of cognitive processes
poses difficulties for designing instruction, considering the conditions that impact thinking can serve
as a useful strategy for rendering cognition and
artmaking in more concrete terms. I recommend
that it is not only needful to engage students
with various conditions that impact cognition in
artmaking but to also overtly augment student
awareness of their cognitive processes. Shoshanna
Felman’s (1993) earlier conceptualization of artistic
practice as a struggle between conscious and
unconscious knowledge, for instance, represents a
highly useful concept that could serve as a guide
in advancing this awareness. Ultimately, cognitive
processes become individual negotiations, but
the development of awareness of such processes
through deliberate address can make a considered
difference.
As observed, jagodzinski’s work demonstrates
the considerable depth that Lacanian psychoanalytic theory offers for understanding subjectivity in
conjunction within a socio-cultural context. The
difficulty of this theory for scholars is well acknowledged as Lacan continued to evolve his theory
over four decades, instituting changes wrought
from rethinking key concepts. Furthermore, Lacan’s
personal discursive style can be considerably challenging. However, because he theorizes subjectivity through the symbolic order and language,
central to contemporary theorizing of art and
artistic practice, I find the theory signals significant
ways of understanding meaning making and
artmaking, suggesting that, as art educators, we
should continue to research these implications for
artistic practice and studio instruction.
R e f erences
Alcorn, M. W. Jr. (1994). The subject of discourse: Reading Lacan through and (beyond) poststructualist texts. In M.
Bracher, R. J. Corthell, F. Massardier-Kennedy, & M. W. Alcorn (Eds.), Lacanian theory of discourse: Subject, structure,
and society (pp. 19-45). New York: New York University Press.
Coffey, M. (2001). Histories that haunt: A conversation with Ann Hamilton. Retrieved February 9, 2008, from http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0425/is_3_60/ai_79350866/print
Cooke, L. (1999). The Ann Hamilton experience. Retrieved February 8, 2008, from http://findarticles.com/p/articles/
mi_m1285/is_7_29/ai_55084047/print
Elbow, P. (1993). The uses of binary thinking. Journal of Advanced Composition, 13(1), 51-78.
Felman, S. (1993). The case of Poe: Applications/Implications of psychoanalysis. In E. Berman (Ed.), Essential papers on
literature and psychoanalysis (pp. 300-322). New York: New York University Press.
Fink, B. (2007). Fundamentals of psychoanalytic technique. New York: W. W. Norton.
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Foster, H. (2004). Psychoanalysis in modernism and as method. In H. Foster, R. Krauss, Y. Bois, and B. Buchloh (Eds.), Art
since 1900 (pp.16-21). New York: Thames & Hudson.
Goodread, E. (1991). Desire and its discontents. New York: Columbia University Press.
Herring, O. (2001-2007). Anarchy, games, and performance: Art:21 interview. Retrieved August 3, 2008, from http://www.
pbs.org/art21/artists/herring/clip2.html
Herring, O. (2007). TASK: Dear all. Retrieved August 27, 2008, from http://www.taskathirshhorn.com/applications/
wordpress/?p=20 [Note: Website no longer active]
Hileman, K. (2006). TASK at Hirshhorn: Brochure text. Retrieved August 27, 2008, from
http://www.taskathirshhorn.com/applications/wordpress/?p=21 [Note: Website no longer active]
jagodzinski, j. (1997). Postmodern dilemmas: Outrageous essays in art and art education. Manwah, NJ:
Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.
jagodzinski, j. (2004). Youth fantasies: The perverse landscape of the media. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
jagodzinski, j. (2005). Music in youth culture: A Lacanian approach. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Lacan, J. (1992). The seminar of Jacques Lacan, book VII, the ethics of psychoanalysis 1959-1960, J. Miller (Ed.), D. Porter
(Trans.). London: Routledge.
Lacan, J. (2006a). The instance of the letter in the unconscious. In Ecrits (B. Fink, Trans.) (pp. 412-441). New York: W.W.
Norton. (Original work published 1957)
Lacan, J. (2006b). The direction of the treatment and the principles of its power. In Ecrits (B. Fink Trans.)
(pp. 487-542). New York: W.W. Norton. (Original work published 1958)
Lehrer, J. (2008). The eureka hunt: Where in our brains do insights come from? The New Yorker, 84(22), 40-45.
Murray, E. (2001-2007). Bop & the process of painting: Art:21, interview. Retrieved February, 2008, from http://www.pbs.
org/art21/artists/murray/clip1.html
Nobus, D. & Quinn, M. (2005). Knowing nothing, staying stupid: Elements for a psychoanalytic epistemology.
New York: Routledge.
Pizzato, M. (2006). Ghosts of theatre and cinema in the brain. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Serra, R. (2002). Verb list. In P. Fabozzi, (Ed.), Artists, critics, context (pp. 234-235). New Jersey: Prentice Hall.
Simon, J. (2002). Ann Hamilton. New York: Abrams.
Sylvester, D. (1997). About modern art: Critical essays 1948-1997. Retrieved July 28, 2007, from
http://www.artchive.com/artchive/J/johnsbio.html
Sollins, S. (2007). Oliver Herring. In M. Sollins (Ed.), Art:21: Art in the twenty-first century 4 (pp.150-161).
New York: Harry N. Abrams.
Solms, M. & Turnbull, O. (2002). The brain and the inner world: An introduction to the neuroscience of subjective experience.
New York: Other Press.
Warner, L. (2007). Art in motion at FLUXspace screening. Retrieved August 3, 2008, from http://www.thebulletin.us/site/
index.cfmnewsid=19116183&BRD=2737&PAG=461&dept_id=576361&rfi=8
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en d notes
1 “Image Makers or Meaning Makers” was developed and taught by the author to 17 graduate art education and MFA
students.
2 Hal Foster (2004) observes that Freud did not consider the unconscious to be liberating and viewed an art totally
free from social convention as an invitation to psychopathology.
3 Support for the overlaps between psychoanalysis and neuroscience can also be found in Mark Solms and Oliver
Turnbull’s (2002), The brain and the inner world: An introduction to the neuroscience of subjective experience. New York:
Other Press; and in Mark Pizzato (2006), Ghosts of theatre and cinema in the brain. New York, New York: Palgrave
Macmillan.
4 The TASK website, http://www.taskathirshhorn.com/applications/wordpress/?p=18, no longer operative, included
information from the performance at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in 2006 such as web documents from Herring (2001-2007), the performers, curator Kirstin Hileman, art historian and independent curator
Laura Roulet, as well as photographs from the event.
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